"Slides are a decoration, not a crutch. If your speech can't stand on its own two legs, don't give it." (From a boss I worked for early on, when "slides" meant "Kodachrome".)

I can only think of two or three slide presentations I've seen in the last 20 years that were worth remembering after walking out of the meeting room. Neither were what people think of a "typical" PowerPoint presentations. Instead, as the article noted, far too many people use PowerPoint when they should use a word processor - to convey reports, present verbose, detailed information, and so on.

I do believe that PowerPoint itself *does* encourage people to make poor presentations. I've had very positive results from getting people who had been giving "dense" PP presentations to switch to other software, particularly Keynote. PowerPoint assumes you want to make a dense presentation; Keynote helps you make an effective one.

But it can only help... the only real factor in making a presentation effective is - the presenter.